LostInSound Compilation | Minds.com Panel Discussion | My Talk From Gratifly Festival | New Mind Folds

"When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments." 

– Marshall McLuhan, 1970

How is 2014 treating you guys?  Me:  superconducting creativity like graphene, transparent to my own motives and desires like glass, but under a lot of pressure like diamond.  The Year of the Horse is already off to a gallop, with some amazing new gigs – including tonight's show at The Scottish Rite Theater in Austin, doing a special A/V performance with Topher Sipes after the screening of my friend Rak Razam's ayahuasca documentary.  Here are a few more to look forward to in the next month:

7 February 2014 - Austin, TX - Mindzai Printing
Third Coast Visions Art Collective Show – Live Collaborative Mural
Cyberacoustic Guitar w/ Live Visuals by Topher Sipes

8 February 2014 - Austin, TX - The Parish
Live Painting for Desert Dwellers, Futexture, Cactus Bath

15 February 2014 - Austin, TX - Cenote
Love Songs For Solo Percussive Guitar, 7 - 9 pm, Free All Ages Show

15 February 2014 - San Marcos, TX - Tantra Coffeehouse
Cyberacoustic Guitar set w/ ARTheism, Hair Farmers, Grace Park, & Violinda

(Texas Wild Rice Festival Fundraiser Show)

6 - 8 March 2014 - Kerrville, TX - Head For The Hills Festival
Cyberacoustic Guitar, Live Painting & more, Details TBA

I will of course record as much as possible to share with all of you who can't make it there in person.  And now on to all of the goodies I have for you this week!  Enjoy, and stay in touch...

"Complexity, Culture, & Consciousness"

A Minds.com Panel Discussion

Watch & Read the Companion Chat on Google+

One of the most awesome conversations I've ever had!  My friend Bill Ottman at Minds.com invited me to help him curate an all-star panel discussion with stem cell researcher and complexity theorist Neil Theis, information scientist and sci-fi professor Richard Doyle, religious scholar and culture critic Erik Davis, and historian and all-around badass Mitch Mignano.

Our 110-minute conversation ranged from whether the universe is alive to the implications of open-source software in government, the consciousness of subatomic particles to the the spiritual consequences of Fukushima.  If you want to blow your mind, make some time to watch this.

LostInSound Winter Compilation 2014

Download it Here & Support Disaster Relief in the Philippines

I was honored to participate in this amazing benefit compilation.  From my friends at LostinSound:

LostinSound.org is happy to announce our V/A Winter Compilation of 2014. This collection features an eclectic track list from 21 of today's most talented and relevant producers. Our winter edition brings something completely new and different to the table, so wash your hands, and get ready to feast on a royal banquet of unreleased material.

We’d like to thank each and everyone of these artists for their tremendous contribution towards this compilation, and their continued support of Lost in Sound as a collective. A special mention goes out to Jacob Unmess for designing the unbelievable cover art for this season’s compilation. 25 limited edition 11x17 prints are available in the "Merch" section of this page.

For the first time ever, we are encouraging but not requiring donations. 100% of these donations will be given to an incredible organization entitled “Transform Relief.” After the most severe typhoon in recorded history hit the Philippines last November, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes and lack access to food or fresh water. Transform Relief is not only bringing radical aid but empowering people to grow their own food using sustainable practices, and non-GMO, fast growth seeds. We will publish a full feature tomorrow when the compilation is released.

We feel obligated to use our skills and our large networks of activated youth to help our brothers and sisters who are in great need. We’ve been given a chance as a collective to unify and aid in a way that transcends what any one individual could accomplish alone. So, if you feel moved, please donate when you download the compilation, be sure to get to know our ally's at Transform Relief.

My Talk From Gratifly Festival 2013

Stream & Download it Here for Free
Like/Share/Comment at Facebook

Excerpts from the epic three-hour-plus, still-going-from-an-all-nighter rant I gave at Gratifly Festival in Avalon, South Carolina, 27 July 2013.

This talk is a map of the problematique - the tragedy and blessing of the human condition as it specifically manifests in an age of metamorphosis. Old worlds are dying and new worlds are being born. How do we navigate the change? By taking a cosmic perspective.

I wish I had the whole three hours for you...but due to the fact that this was recorded on my pocket digital camera, I was limited by the lifespan of my lithium batteries. Consequently the audio is also substandard, but I am nonetheless happy to share it. There's something magical about what came through in that place and time – exhausted and in love...

New Mind Folds

"Author & Inventor" (as it says euphemistically on the packaging) Alex Grey invented these modified blindfolds to let people experience total darkness with their eyes open.  Perfect for simulating blindness or going on mental journeys in the daytime, Mind Folds are also a fun surface for me to practice my oil painting technique.  Email me with your budget if you'd like one!

Check it out on FB

Check it out on FB

Merchandise

I do pretty much all of my work as a gift to the commons (that's you!) and am supported by people's donations – I'm now accepting Bitcoin as well as monthly subscriptions through Paypal on my homepage – but if you want to help me stay afloat as an artist and get something cool out of the deal, here are some options for you:

Thanks for reading!  Stay in touch and have a beautiful day...

Angels, Dragons, & My Live Painting From AURA 2013

"It is high time to ask whether it is really any scandal, any deplorable inconsistency,
for a human being to be both angel and animal with equal devotion."

– Alan Watts

Seraphim

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Buy 11"x17" Prints

Painted with opaque markers on 24"x36" stretched canvas at:

2013 02 15, 16, 17 AURA Festival at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park

(Consider The Source, Break Science, Kung Fu, Perpetual Groove, 

Greenhouse Lounge, Papadosio x2, Infinite Geometry)

02 23 Cirque de L'Amour at Austin Music Hall (Vibesquad, Quixotic, Tipper)

02 28 The Parish (The Digital Connection, ONE4ALL, Chris B.)

03 01, 02 Head For The Hills at Quiet Valley Ranch (Eliot Lipp, A Live One)

Click below to check out the whole process of this piece:

How many different animals can you see in this painting?  I obviously meant to put snakes in there, but was surprised to find forms that remind me of an owl, an octopus, and a tiger (or crocodile)...and someone surprised me with "elephant," as well.

The chimeric nature of this piece makes sense, since it's a remix of several of my earlier paintings.  There are many different visual references to my other work collected here and alloyed, sublimated.  Taken together you can see my work as a kind of evolutionary progression – not a linear march but a melody, returning time and again to weave through certain themes...

Painting is a process of discovery for me, a kind of intuitive listening, and this painting connected more dots for me than most – namely, the relationship between angels and dragons.  The Old Testament word for the highest angels, "seraphim," literally means "the burning ones," and is used throughout the Bible as a synonym for "snakes."  Flaming snakes with wings?  Gosh, that sounds familiar...

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me – even after years of savoring the connection between "Archangel Michael & The Serpent" and "St. George & The Dragon" (and "Lord Garuda & The Naga," further East...birds versus snakes, world round).  The snake – which as many of you know shows up in the yogic traditions as a symbol for the wriggling, electric life force called "kundalini," sprouts wings when our animal nature reaches its crescendo and sprouts from the crown of the head, fully integrated with subtler, perceptibly "feathery" celestial energies.

Following that rabbit down (or up?) its hole, I remembered that to the Chinese, the dragon is an occulted natural force, a terrible mystery that reveals itself through what insurance companies call "Acts of God" – lightning, wildfires, and floods.  In other words, the dragon appears worldwide as a kind of mythological shorthand for the terribly transcendent, especially in what author Erik Davis calls "the electromagnetic imaginary" – our collective mystical experience of electricity and magnetism, whose awesome power has captured social imagination for thousands of years.

In a blog post describing his vision of the coming alchemical, musical paradigm he believes will replace materialism, cultural historian and former MIT professor William Irwin Thompson draws a straight line through angels, aliens, and electromagnetism:

"Since [our experience of] space would no longer be empty and separating, space itself would be a plenum of vibrating streams of energy that in the medieval lore of the Jewish Zohar in Spain and of the Muslim Sufis in Andalusia were known as angels. At the end of industrial civilization, through the popularity of science fiction, these beings were often re-presented as high-tech extra-terrestrials."

In other words, aliens = electricity = dragons = angels.  Chew on that for a minute.

(Then watch this documentary, Thunderbolts of the Gods, which argues that enormous electrical storms in space were responsible for much of our ancient mythos...)

It's no wonder that all of these things captivate me, and so many other people.  Whatever else they are, angels and dragons and aliens (as well as flames and lightning, the concrete natural phenomena in which these symbols are experientially anchored) are all wrapped up in one big ball of myth together, implicated as the various faces of the transcendentally Big-Loud-And-Scary.  Their popularity persists because they help us discuss the Mysterium Tremendum – that truth greater than our own, before which we quake as children...

Speaking of which:

Definitive New Live Recordings

Listen/Download

Definitive live recordings of nine incendiary guitar tapping etudes and space-hued transpersonal love songs, performed to an intimate listening room audience at Flipnotics in Austin, TX, 30 January 2013. 

A return from improvised electronic guitar work to my roots as an instrumental composer and singer-songwriter, this album features my "nice guitar," a 2001 Martin D35, and its new LR Baggs Anthem amplification system - the first pickup capable of reproducing the gorgeous tone of this instrument.

Seriously, these songs have never sounded this good.

You can get the album free for buying a print of the cover painting.  It's $3.33 or more if you just want clear, brilliant live recordings of my most dazzling solo guitar work, without the art.  (And if you like my music but not enough to support it, here are some decent live recordings you can have for free.)

"Michael Garfield has some absolutely amazing chops...
the musicianship on this album is truly wonderful."

- Marquee Magazine (on Alive With You, 2010)

"Esoteric and intricate, I found myself struggling to describe his sound and style...
some surprisingly pleasurable heartbreak."

- Mousike Magazine (on Double-Edged Sword, 2008)

(More reviews here if you need convincing.)

That's all for now.  Thank you for reading!  In the next update I'll share pics of my Barton Springs Salamander painting!  I'm super excited to show you that – but in the meantime be well and have a beautiful day!